


gutter spangles

by Fanless



Category: Charlie Bone Series | Children of the Red King - Jenny Nimmo
Genre: Gen, Minor Character(s), POV Minor Character, The Piminy Street Endowed, back at it again with the characters nobody cares about, damn daniel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-14 00:36:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11196771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fanless/pseuds/Fanless
Summary: Nobody tells the tales of the losers and the lost.





	gutter spangles

**Author's Note:**

> When The Red Knight came out, I was fascinated by the Piminy Street magicians. They had style, potential, and loads of personality; it's a shame that we only got to see them for a little peek here and there.

He isn't dead when they find him in the ruin. Not yet.

He is bodily hauled off like so many pounds of bruised, oozing potatoes, dosed with potion after nostrum after foul-smelling mess. They wait for him to heal, some impatiently because they need the extra hand, some grimly with more maroon thoughts of vengeance in their head than light-blue thoughts of concern, some out of a slightly dented sense of loyalty: the Piminy Street gang may be an arcane bunch, but they look out for their own.

Amos whimpers and slurs in his steaming fever (the irony escapes few), and the bedsheets run cerise with licks of matchstick fire that constantly scorch until Dolores begins soaking the linen in ice water before changing it. Sometimes she has to pour water directly over him. It steams. The undershirt man jests that Miss Slingshot fancies the arsonist. She slaps him.

A week he lies in this near-coma.

And when his eyes open seeing more than the tortured visions of blazing trees and white manes, no one is there with him.

No one is there with him, and no one has been for over a week, and there are ropy strands of fire sprawling over the dry sheets and down the sides of the lumpy mattress and across the knotholed floor and over the mouse-gnawed molding and up the nail-pocked walls and up and up and across to the anorexic electric chandelier, which has somehow caught ablaze even though nothing else is smoldering; the glory of ballrooms past, or a blackly comic parody, in a low-rent apartment bedroom that isn't his own, and the first thing Amos Byrne thinks upon being restored to life is:

_Oh, bugger._

**Author's Note:**

> Amos Byrne was definitely my favorite of all of them: fire power is always a sure bet, and I've got this weird thing for scrawny unhealthy blokes. Besides, he's vaguely ginger-ish.


End file.
